Premonitions | ✓

three

"Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)" -Loretta Lynn

     It had been two weeks since the two last spoke. Anna was beside herself, drinking whiskey with every meal --when she did eat-- and Darcy constantly whining at the state of his owner. That evening at the lake, Anna had continuously denied telling Lars the sob story that was her life. 

     They only spoke for barely half an hour before he got tired of her excuses, leaving her alone with the rottweiler there on the grass. 

     Anna instantly began to cry. She couldn't help it. She knew he wasn't going to instantly forgive her but she had hoped that he would be the same old Lars, always there for her whether she wanted to talk about it or not. But, Anna saw that her leaving made him bitter. 

     She hated the fact that she had to leave. If she had a choice, she would have gone against her leaving the city she had fallen in love with along with the lumberjack of a man she had met those two years prior. Anna couldn't understand why she wouldn't tell him the truth. 

     Maybe she didn't want him to think ill of her. 

     The short woman was always an open book. So wide open that the font that was her life was enlarged for everyone to read, she never lied or kept secrets, her Catholic guilt wouldn't let her, except with Lars. It was only because when she moved away from her born and raised home, San Diego. Anna promised herself that she was to be a different version of herself, to finally live the life she always wanted. 

     The life her toxic family wasn't a part of. And that meant keeping them a secret. She cared for Lars so much she had lied and told him she had no family besides her grandparents and a sister in Texas.

     Anna lied on the two-seater couch in a fetal position while Darcy lied on the carpeted floor next to her, waiting for his owner to get up and do something besides drink liquor and cry. I'm selfish and pitiful, Anna told herself. 

     She was supposed to be visiting her grandmother during Christmas break, but the winter semester was beginning any day now, and she needed the extra money. Plus, she found out her mother, stepfather, and two younger brothers made the trip from the northeast corner of the state of North Carolina to visit the elderly woman for the holiday. 

     Anna had been getting calls from her mother for weeks, even a couple from her stepfather. She ignored them all. When she thought of the people that had raised her, only spiteful thoughts plagued her and Anna despised it. 

     Her parents turned her into someone she found weak and pathetic. Now her birth father, he was of the same tale but told a different way. He couldn't give two shits about his firstborn. Saying that the phone worked both ways. It was then she knew she had lost him too. 

     No matter what anyone said, Anna was alone. She had three younger siblings, two sets of parents, two sets of grandparents, and more aunts, uncles, and cousins than she could count. But none of them gave an actual shit about her until they needed money or wanted to put her accomplishments on their pedestal. 

     Saying that she would be nothing if it weren't for them.

     Anna suddenly began to cry loudly. She felt sick to her stomach. The woman hadn't broken down or even thought about her family in years until that moment, until she felt that she had lost the last person who actually gave a damn about her, Lars. She loved the man, still did even to that day. 

     But she knew that when he was mad, he was to stay mad for as long as he deemed fit. 

     It was a year into their friendship when they got into a stupid fight on the week of Thanksgiving, "I don't understand why you won't take me to go visit your grandmother, Anna!" Lars yelled, exhausted from her excuses.